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Outdoors with Mark Sturtevant: Hunters open spring turkey season

Thousands of hunters take to the woods to find spring gobblers

By Mark Sturtevant

Updated:
05/03/2014 05:17:07 PM EDT

This weekend marks the beginning of the 2014 spring turkey season, and thousands of hunters will begin the annual pursuit of the mighty gobbler. The regal birds, once proposed for the symbol of our nation, are a worthy adversary for the hunter.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission reports good reproduction last spring and expects plenty of young birds, also known as jakes, to be available for hunters this season. It says that statewide populations have been in decline in recent year, but hunter success has remained high for the past 20 years.

Since jakes are expected to be found in good numbers, there should be plenty of action for new hunters and callers. Experienced hunters looking for mature gobblers may have to invest more time and boot leather to find their trophies, weeding through the flocks of young birds that respond more eagerly to calls.

That challenge is what makes turkey hunting so enjoyable. Calling, and the anticipation and thrill of hearing a bird answer, sets the stage for the mental game. The hunter must decide whether to move or remain in position and hope to bring the answering bird all the way in. I remember playing that game a lot the first few seasons I took to the spring woods.

One bird in Ohio stays in my memory. I stayed put and called to him sparingly for an hour or more. He answered several times, each time clearly closer to me than before. Just when I was sure he would pop into view at any moment, he fell silent for fifteen minutes. When I was able to coax another gobble out of him, he was a good 200 yards away.

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Making the right decisions requires knowledge and experience of turkey behavior, and a good understanding of the terrain between hunter and quarry. Those who have scouted their hunting areas thoroughly, and who have hunted those areas for several seasons, have the best chance of making the right decision.

That Ohio bird was one I had run onto late in a multi-day hunt, when I was running and gunning, trying to cover as much new ground as possible and strike a bird. The decision to move toward him was made for me, as he was on private property and I on the edge of the public hunting area.

If I had access to his location, and some familiarity with the terrain, that encounter might have ended differently. I'll never know what stopped his approach, whether something in my calling tipped him off, or whether some terrain feature between us turned the game.

Those kinds of encounters are what make spring turkey hunting special though.

That running and gunning approach is chancy, but sometimes it may be the only way to strike a bird when the areas you know well are empty. Particularly on a travelling hunt, scouting and hunting time is limited, the run and gun approach allows you to do both at once. If you are trying a new area it's worthwhile to consider the tactic.